Digital delivery has emerged as an efficient and profitable method of distributing digital goods such as, for example, software applications and/or data files. One type of digital good that is efficient for software manufacturers to distribute digitally comprises software product updates that consist of emergency bug fixes and patches. However, due to the emergency nature of these bug fixes and patches, software manufacturers typically perform only limited testing on them and therefore limit their distribution to only those customers who have reported the errors being remedied. The requirement to limit distribution of a software product update consisting of an emergency bug fix or patch to a particular customer or set of customers is one that current digital distribution systems are unable to address efficiently.
One prior attempt to provide efficient mechanisms for delivery of software bug fixes and patches to a particular customer enabled manufacturers to access the customer's servers directly and to update the software application. However, this solution requires the customer to expose its systems to external users, which could potentially lead to security breaches, and does not appear to provide any safeguard means for preventing the loss of updated data. Another prior attempt enabled the manufacturers to store the digital objects on a common FTP server and to grant access to customers to retrieve respective digital objects. However, this solution does not appear to limit file availability to target customers if an anonymous FTP is used. Alternatively, if a password-protected FTP is used, the system administrator of the FTP server must intervene to create and configure an FTP user account for each specific customer, and further must administer each of such accounts.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a method and apparatus for creating a delivery mechanism configured to enable manufacturers to deliver customer-specific data objects or files to particular existing customers. There is also a need to provide a method and apparatus for the customer-specific data objects or files that will not require involvement of information technology resources beyond those specifically designed to administer the software delivery process. There is a further need for a method and apparatus wherein customers should not be required to make any system configuration changes to access a customer-specific data object or file and should be able to download the customer-specific data object or file at any point in time. There is an additional need for manufacturers to be able to make data objects or files available to more than one specific, targeted customer.